TeeJay's Friends' Journals

Cute caps

jdavidb — 2010-08-19T21:55:41+00:00

I'm doing some quick code generation (the output is Java), and I found myself writing the below routine. I like it because of the names I picked for the variables. Not exactly self-documenting (although it is when you think about it), but this is throwaway. You can probably tell what the code is doing and why I named the variables as I did, and you might be entertained.

sub uc_prop { my($prop) = @_; my $p = substr($prop, 0, 1); my $P = uc($p); my $rop = substr($prop, 1); return "$P$rop"; }

Strawberry Perl install rolled back

jdavidb — 2010-07-26T20:34:33+00:00

Strawberry Perl 5.12.0 was almost completely installed when suddenly it flashed some message I didn't see into the install wizard and the progress bars started moving backward! I have never seen anything like it. I realized the progress bar caption had been changed to simply "Rolling Back Action" and watched as at least three anonymous "actions" were rolled back, progress bar by progress bar. Then the install wizard simply told me "Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely Strawberry Perl Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again. Click the Finish button to exit the Setup Wizard."

I wish it would tell me what the error was so I might have some hope of correcting it.

Hiveminder: personal RT, for free

jdavidb — 2010-07-19T16:58:36+00:00

You mean someone will provide RT for me to use for free on the web? And they've built an awesome AJAX-y frontend for it? And they allow me to tag tasks and they encourage me to keep my work todo list and as many personal todo lists as I want in here? And they give me awesome search utilities for figuring this out and keeping it organized?

It's almost like a dream come true.

Strawberry Win32 GUI programming

jdavidb — 2010-06-09T15:10:53+00:00

If I wanted to write a Strawberry program to run as a daemon and periodically pop up alerts on my machine, and I had no Windows Perl GUI programming experience other than an abortive look at WxPerl years before anybody ever thought of Strawberry, what module would I be looking for?

Another StackOverflow question moved: what's the deal?

jdavidb — 2010-05-20T14:18:10+00:00

Stack Overflow is made significantly less useful when ignorant people move Perl programming questions to serverfault.com because the questions are about "servers, networks or the administration of many machines.".

This kind of ridiculous micromanaging by people who are awarded points for being anti-helpful is what destroyed Wikipedia as a place I wanted to participate.

Testing gurus, would you please chime in?

jdavidb — 2010-05-07T17:16:23+00:00

The question is how to test a class that installs system services: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2790072/unit-testing-installation-of-services

Bob Jacobsen interview on FLOSS Weekly

merlyn — 2010-04-23T03:55:11+00:00

Last week, I interviewed Bob Jacobsen for FLOSS Weekly. Bob used Perl's Artistic 1.0 license on some Java code to manage model trains. The code was later patented by an Oregon-based company(!) and then Bob got sued(!!) for Bob distributing the other company's patented code(!!!). The good part of the story is that this is the first test at the US Federal Appeals Court level for an open source license to be enforceable even if no money exchanges hands, and... we won!

Bob spent a lot of time and money on the case though. Listen to the podcast and contribute to his legal defense if you care about open source.

Ball of mud song

jdavidb — 2010-04-20T15:01:23+00:00

Anyone got any good songs about working on a ball of mud?

From UTC to US/Central

jdavidb — 2010-04-01T17:57:23+00:00

I've been living on UTC time since just before the end of Daylight Saving Time, 2005. Today I have reset my workstation to Central time. It's like looking at the world with fresh eyes.

My settings on websites will follow at some point.

RIP Jaime Escalante

jdavidb — 2010-03-31T12:43:26+00:00

Jaime Escalante, America's best math teacher, passed away last night. Escalante built a spectacular mathematics program in a struggling inner-city school district, teaching disadvantaged children all the way through Advanced Placement Calculus. His story was depicted in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. I've got to say this man was really one of my personal heroes. When Sarah and I started talking about homeschooling our children it was thoughts of Mr. Escalante that made me get really serious about the kind of education our children could have with us directing.

Things I didn't know about the Walls

jdavidb — 2010-03-19T17:00:01+00:00

Larry's son, Lewis, is writing a 2D game engine in Perl 6 using Rakudo (http://www.wall.org/~lewis/).

Larry's wife, Gloria, took the Revised Common Lectionary and expanded it to make a complete Bible reading program which covers the entire Bible in three years (http://www.wall.org/~gloria/lect/). And I wonder if maybe I'm not the only person in history who's ever written a program in Perl to divide up the Bible for reading, after all...

Gone

Ovid — 2010-03-14T08:02:43+00:00

Like many others, I'm no longer posting here very much. You'll find my new technical journal at blogs.perl.org. It's much shinier.

As you can see, use.perl visits have been dropping for a while (blogs.perl.org is too new to show up on that search) and the front page of use.perl has been sadly neglected. As for blogs.perl.org, after an initial rough start, plenty of people are switching over and are very happy with the shiny.

I have fond memories of use.perl.org, but it's just too old and out-of-date. Come on over to our new platform and look around. Plus, tell us what you want changed about it. (To be fair, while I was involved in the project to get it launched (mostly kibitzing and asking why things were stalled -- I'm such a marketroid :), the hands-on work was Dave Cross, Aaron Crane and the wonderful folks at SixApart.)

Test::Class::Most

Ovid — 2010-01-31T19:25:10+00:00

Test::Class::Most.

Testing with PostgreSQL

Ovid — 2010-01-30T16:22:57+00:00

My new personal project has a PostgreSQL database. Here's how I'm handling testing.

ah, dreams...

Matts — 2010-01-26T10:31:17+00:00

I just woke from a dream where it was rjbs' birthday and we got him an onion cake. Only the person who made the cake misunderstood, and instead of a cake shaped like an onion he cooked it WITH onions in it.

Bizarro.

Time::Piece test failures on Win32

Matts — 2010-01-25T23:23:53+00:00

Can someone with Time::Piece test failures on Win32 please contact me offlist? I have a proposed patch I'd like to test, but no Win32 perl to test it on.

Roles without Moose?

Ovid — 2010-01-25T14:04:31+00:00

Milliseconds are important.

Unless what?

Ovid — 2010-01-15T11:47:53+00:00

Unless what?

Perl 10.1.0 doesn't build on Cygwin

jdavidb — 2010-01-14T17:16:42+00:00

Is building on Cygwin not supported any more, I take it? Did we forget about it?

CCCMD = gcc -DPERL_CORE -c -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV -U__STRICT_ANSI__ - fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -O3 -Wall -W -Wextra -Wdeclarati on-after-statement -Wendif-labels PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin:/home /dblackstone/bin :/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/Progr am\ Files\ (x86)/J ava/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c /WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/ZipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive /c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/apache-ant-1.7.1/bin: /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/cvsn t:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/GnuW in32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/ c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapack:/usr/local:/etc:/usr /lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--export -all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base -L/usr/local/lib - o miniperl.exe \ malloc.o gv.o toke.o perly.o pad.o regcomp.o dump.o util.o mg.o ree ntr.o mro.o hv.o av.o run.o pp_hot.o sv.o pp.o scope.o pp_ctl.o pp_sys.o doop.o doio.o regexec.o utf8.o taint.o deb.o universal.o xsutils.o globals.o perlio.o p erlapi.o numeric.o mathoms.o locale.o pp_pack.o pp_sort.o cygwin.o \ miniperlmain.o opmini.o perlmini.o -ldl -lcrypt /bin/sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `(' /bin/sh: -c: line 0: `PATH=/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1:.:/home/dblackstone/bin :/home/dblackstone/ bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/cygdrive/c/P rogram\ Files\ (x86)/Java/jdk1.6.0_16/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive /c/WINDOWS:/c ygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Z ipGenius\ 6/:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/MySQL/MySQL\ Server\ 5.1/bin:/cygdrive/c /apache-ant-1.7.1/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Git/cmd:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/cvsnt:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/PuTTY:/cygdrive/c/Prog ram\ Files\ (x86)/GnuWin32/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawberry/c/bin:/cygdrive/c/strawber ry/perl/bi n:/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/QuickTime/QTSystem/:/usr/lib/lapac k:/usr/local:/etc:/usr/lib:/lib:/sbin: /usr/sbin:/usr/libexec gcc -Wl,--enable-au to-import -Wl,--export-all-symbols -Wl,--stack,8388608 -Wl,--enable-auto-image-b ase -L/usr/local/lib -o miniperl.exe \' make[1]: *** [miniperl.exe] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dblackstone/perl-5.10.1' make: *** [install] Error 2

Dear Recruiters

Ovid — 2010-01-13T13:06:11+00:00

Dear Recruiters

Next QA Hackathon -- What Do You Need?

Ovid — 2010-01-12T11:37:14+00:00

Read about the next QA Hackathon.

Most Popular Testing Modules - January 2010

Ovid — 2010-01-07T21:46:46+00:00

Stack Overflow career spam

jdavidb — 2010-01-07T15:26:00+00:00

I got a fairly innocuous spam from Stack Overflow advertising their new job hunting site, where they would like me to upload my resume.

Sorry, Stack Overflow; I'm smart for that (thanks to Andy Lester). I also don't particularly appreciate the spam, although it's the first I've ever gotten and wasn't too obtrusive.

Warning compiling perl stuff on Snow Leopard

Matts — 2010-01-04T22:13:57+00:00

I've searched but can't find any reference to this...

Compiling IO::KQueue on Snow Leopard I get the following warning:

KQueue.xs: In function 'XS_IO__KQueue_kevent': KQueue.xs:71: warning: format not a string literal and no format arguments

Yet that line is just:

Newxz(ke, max_events, struct kevent);

Which seems to me pretty standard perl, and no format strings involved (though Newxz expands quite a few macros).

Cool Things in Perl 6: Subsets

Ovid — 2010-01-04T13:11:31+00:00

They're going to be a lot of fun.

I'm twittering my Perl stuff at http://twitter.com/briandfoy

brian_d_foy — 2010-01-02T13:06:32+00:00

I'll tweet at (http://twitter.com/briandfoy_perl) when I have something to say in 140 characters. I'll almost always use "Perl" when I post.

Effective Perl Programming master class at Frozen Perl

brian_d_foy — 2010-01-01T13:32:50+00:00

At Frozen Perl 2010 in Minneapolis, I'm teaching a new master class based on my latest book, Effective Perl Programming, 2nd Edition. Perl has changed quite a bit since Joseph Hall wrote the first edition over 10 years ago. Josh McAdams and I have added a lot of new information as well as updated the existing material. In the one-day class for intermediate Perl programmers, I'll cover selected topics from the book, including:

Working with Unicode in Perl
Tricks with filehandles
New regex features in Perl 5.10 and later
Playing with pack()
Using closures to make things simpler
and other topics as time allows

Although the book hasn't been published yet, it is available for pre-order, and attendees to the class can get a sneak peek at the working manuscript as well as a soft copy of the course slides.

Perl 6 Config::INI parser on github

Ovid — 2009-12-30T17:48:47+00:00

Details here.

Improve My Perl 6!

Ovid — 2009-12-24T11:29:45+00:00

Collaborative filtering (user recommendations) in Perl 6.

SVK retired

jdavidb — 2009-12-21T22:00:29+00:00

I didn't notice, but SVK retired in May. Thanks to its authors and Best Practical for providing it. I agree with the sentiment that people moved on from Subversion quicker than expected; I am glad that I went on to git instead of spending too much time with SVK, although I would've liked to have learned it earlier and gotten to know it better.